Profit Sourcery

By Lauren Carter

A Guide to CamelCamelCamel Part 2: Sales Rank Graphs

Last week we looked at how you can use the price history graphs at CamelCamelCamel.com (CCC) to help you make more informed buying decisions when sourcing stock to sell on Amazon. This week we’re going to look at the other graph you can find on CCC; Sales Rank History.

If you’re a regular reader of our blog you’ll know that Sales Rank is one of the most important factors to consider when looking for new products to sell on Amazon.

Looking at the Sales Rank number alone is not always useful because it is solely a snapshot of how the product is selling right now. To understand whether the product has sold well consistently and work out whether that trend is likely to continue you need to look at how the sales rank has changed over the last few months or even years. This information cannot be found on the products Amazon listing which is why, for every product we display in you ProfitSourcery dashboard, we provide a link to CamelCamelCamel.com.

The graph you see above shows the Sales Rank History for a toy which dates as far back as 2012. You can adjust the date range to information on the last month, the last three months, the last six months or the last year. It’s up to you to decide how far back you want to look for information. Looking over the last month or three tells you how the product has been selling recently which is usually the most important thing to find out. For seasonal products you will probably need to look at the data for a year. If you are looking at some Halloween decorations at the beginning of September, for example, then you probably wouldn’t expect sales to be great for the last month but the sales information for last year in the lead up to Halloween will be a lot more useful to you.

The example above shows a great product. We can see from the graph that sales have been pretty consistent for years! If we take a closer look at the 3month view of the graph we can see more detail (below).

Here we can see that sales were consistent but really picked up around the end of June. As a seller you might want to look into why that’s the case. If we compare to the sales history graph (below) for the same time period for this product we can see that around the time sales picked up, the price dropped from over £10.00 to below £5.00. If you were hoping to be able to sell this product at a price closer to £10.00 then you might expect that sales aren’t going to be quite so fast although still decent.

In the next example (below) we can see a Sales Rank graph which indicates a product you probably wouldn’t want to invest in. The high point for this product is around 27,000 which would put it in the top 3% of products in Beauty, if you took that at face value you might think this is a good seller. A closer look at the CCC graph however tells us that this highpoint is unusual for the product and if you were to buy it you might not expect to see particularly frequent sales. This example only has one months’ worth of data to look back on; ideally you would want to look a bit further back to see if one sale a month is normal for this product. The start of the graph shows a downward slope which would imply there was at least one sale in the previous month. In a case like this you would need to decide whether or not you were willing to take a risk on this product. You would need to expect fairly slow sales.

CamelCamelCamel really is an invaluable resource for Amazon Sellers. You need to spend some time looking at their graphs and learning how to interpret them. The easiest way to do that is watch the graphs for products you are selling. After you’ve made a few sales have a look at the CCC graph for the product and see how they appear. This really helps cement in your mind what the graph represents and what assumptions you can make about products from their graphs.